In typography, a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a complete character set having a single size and in the style of a particular typeface. For example, the set of all characters for 9-point Bulmer italic is a font, and the 10-point size Bulmer italic would be a separate font, as would the 9 point upright. The term font is also often used as a metonym for typeface.
Since the introduction of computer fonts based on fully scalable, vector outlines, a broader definition of font has evolved. Font is no longer typically size-specific, but may still refer to a single style. For example, Bulmer regular, Bulmer italic, Bulmer bold and Bulmer bold italic are four fonts, but one typeface.
In addition to character height, there are several characteristics which may mechanically distinguish fonts, dependent upon the script(s) that a typeface supports. For example, in European alphabetic scripts, i.e. Roman, Cyrillic and Greek, the main such properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle, and the per character width.
Most typefaces employ on the roman script, and hence a regular or standard font is often labeled as roman, such as to also distinguish it from bold or thin, and from italic or oblique. Further, different fonts of the same face may be used in the same work, such as for various degrees and types of emphasis.
For computing embodiments of typeface, font metrics refers to metadata consisting of numeric values relating to the size and space in a font overall, or in the individual glyphs of a font. A glyph is the artistic representation of a letter character. Font-wide metrics include cap height, x-height, ascender height, descender depth, and font bounding box, for example. Glyph-level metrics include the glyph bounding box, the advance width (total space for the glyph), and side bearings (space that pads the glyph outline on either side), for example.
Computer text editors take two forms, plain text and rich text. Plain text editors only render text in a single font style, typically called the system of console front. Rich text editors support multiple fonts and styles such as italic and bold. In typical embodiments of a standard rich text pad editor, if the user wants to select a different font for each character, the user first types the character, using the keyboard, then highlights the character, using the mouse or other pointing device, then continuing with the mouse, accesses the font selection menu, typically a drop-down combo-box, then navigates to a font by name, then tries to assess if the navigated font is truly the desired font (since the font menu only displays the name of the font rendered in the font, not all characters), then selects the font, and views the results. If the font glyph for that character is not appropriate, the user has to repeat this laborious process again and again until the desired look is achieved.
Hand lettered art and/or letters are artistic, aesthetically pleasing, and far more creative than typical computing fonts. To an extent, this pleasing nature of hand lettered art stems from the slight variability that occurs between each hand drawn letter. However, the use of the computer stifles this effect in that one character corresponds to one glyph, that is there is one appearance type for the font letters of that glyph. For example in an individual computer typeface font, each letter character ‘a’ is rendered exactly the same.
Thus, a need exists for a computer to have one character artistically and conveniently corresponded to multiple glyphs, so that computer output may mimic hand lettering and create the availability of multiple, pleasing appearance types.